Podcasting Statistics

A Round Up of Podcasting Statistics

This page represents a collection of statistics about podcasts that I have come across whilst researching for my own podcast, The Richard Dally Podcast. Podcast statistics for individual shows can be difficult to obtain so I also post these when I come across them. My goal is to establish a page which will be useful to podcasters, advertisers, researchers and journalists looking for podcasting statistics and data.

I recommend you visit the sources that I reference as I generally only list some highlights of the podcasting statistics on this page.

Last updated: 7th June 2016

I do my best to quote the original source for all statistics but if you feel I have misrepresented your material or would prefer me to remove references to your data then please contact me and I will be happy to do so.

Stitcher

Stitcher represents four percent of listening for an average podcast, and for some shows up to eight percent. Source: Rain News, 7th June 2016

Podcast Advertising

An intern from FiveThirtyEight.com listened to the top 100 podcasts in the main iTunes chart and counted 186 ads; 35 percent of those adverts were from just five companies. Source: Ben Thompson – The Future of Podcasting, 7th June 2016

The Podcast Consumer 2016 by Edison Research

The Podcast Consumer 2016 report contains new data on podcast users in America, derived from the Infinite Dial 2016 study from Edison Research and Triton Digital. This is a comprehensive report that is available for download. It covers podcast statistics on demographics, podcast consumption, listening device usage, social media usage and other media behaviours. The research was conducted in January and February 2016.

Some key points from the report:

55% of the US population (150 million people) aged 12+ are aware of the term Podcasting

36% of the US population aged 12+ have listened to at least one podcast

21% of the US population aged 12+ listen to at least one podcast episode a month

27% of those aged 12-24 have listened to podcasts in the last month

24& of men and 18% of women listened to a podcast in the last month

The average time spent listening to podcasts each week is 4 hours 10 minutes

Wondery/comScore Study – Podcast Consumption on The Rise

Nearly one in five Americans aged 18-49 report listening to podcasts at least once a month, while nearly one in three men 18-34 do so.

Compared to the average consumer, podcast listeners are more likely to have a college or higher education, $100k+ household income, and to be early adopters in multiple categories including movies, electronics and CPG.

Nielsen Scarborough Study

Their study found that podcast listeners are more adventurous, and they enjoy outdoor activities such as hiking, backpacking and camping, with one in four listeners having engaged in these activities during the past year. Podcast listeners are 49% more likely to have bicycled and 22% more likely to have gone boating.

Bridge Ratings’ Podcasting Audit

Podcast listeners are more affluent and educated than average. These are traits advertisers love and revenue growth potential for podcasting remains positive.

But they also found that on average 26% of podcast listeners tuned out or abandoned the podcast episodes within the first 30 minutes. Many reasons were given for tune-out during podcast listening including topic, host, lifestyle impact, technical quality and whether or not the podcast held their interest.

Abandonment rates differed with podcast subject matter. The top podcast subjects with the greatest average time spent listening were: